FOX Business sent Anchor Liz Claman to Silicon Valley for a three-day look at the technology industry. Here’s what happened on Day Two.

InSTEDD CEO Talks About Swine Flu

InSTEDD’s mission is to use technology to improve global health and humanitarian action. It is an innovated lab for tools designed to respond to major health-related events and natural or human-caused disasters. 

Of the recent swine-flu outbreak, InSTEDD CEO Eric Rasmussen said: “It is not over yet…There are still cases being reported from all over the world, and it really is as close to a pandemic as we need to see to test some of the things we have going on.”

In a situation like this, InSTEDD can improve detection; improve response to pandemics and natural disasters.

“What we have done is identify some gaps in the systems already present in the world, and try to fill those gaps -- sometimes with technology, sometimes with education,” he said. “We have, among other things, innovated an SMS system to allow small groups to form and get information to agencies that can then locate on the map where the communities are reporting problems from.”

InSTEDD is also working with public health agencies and a number of responsible companies to promote communication and global health.

SolFocus Contributes to Solar Energy Production

The Obama Administration stimulus plan promises to spend billions of dollars on alternative-energy sources, and one of the industries that could shine from the policy is solar power.

SolFocus uses Concentrated Photovoltaics, a process that uses highly recyclable materials to cut costs. It takes a small amount of semiconductor material with high efficiency to produce as much energy as possible in as small a space as possible.

“It's a transition period for us, and to do that amidst this economic meltdown has been exciting to say the least,” said Mark Crowley, CEO of SolFocus. “We really have been able to capture all the incubated technology information, and with the product capabilities that we had over the last couple of years, this is turning into a manufacturing engine now.”

A Look Inside the Computer History Museum

FBN's Claman took a tour of the Computer History Museum with CEO John C. Hollar, who said the original calculators and computers have the same principles as the originals.

The Museum opened in Silicon Valley, Calif., in 2003 and houses the first mainframe computers, the history of PC and original printers and calculators.

'Turning Cement Into Green'

Brent Contstanz, founder & CEO of Calera Corporation, said his company is dedicated to reversing global warming by capturing and storing greenhouse gases in the built environment.

“We have developed the ability to do, basically, what is done in nature every day... We make calcium and magnesium into material that can be used for cement or concrete, and asphalt that can be put into the environment,” he said. “We can use stable isotopes of carbon and prove carbon is in the concrete.”

Contstanz said Calera has the infrastructure to get everything in place more money coming in than it needs.

Brightsource on Solar Energy

BrightSource Energy develops and operates the worlds most cost-effective and reliable large-scale solar energy projects, hoping to make solar energy cost competitive with fossil fuels.

“We take lots of mirrors and focus the suns rays up on a boiler,” said John Woolard, Brightsource CEO. “In that boiler, we generate steam and that steam is very high temperature and high pressure, which allows it to generate electricity.”

Brightsource has spent the last several years working with large utilities on fairly large contracts, including Pacific Gas & Electric (PGE) and Southern California Edison (SCE). With PG & E, Brightsource will power 5,030 homes.

“We should have our first sites permitted by the end of this year,” Woolard said.

Levy Gerzberg -- CEO of Zoran

Zoran Corp. (ZRAN) is a worldwide giant in the tech industry, and has created high quality products that meet the requirements of consumer electronics. The company is entertaining chips in 500 million electronics around the world, including digital cameras and DVD players.

"We are focusing on a very unique technology and integration of discipline so we have systems and software applications, and our chip designers are working with our customers that include all the leaders in consumer electronics market,” Zoran’s CEO Levy Gerzberg said. “They need our software and chips.”

The company is focusing on the integration of several designs, and Gerzberg said he is not worried about the new plans for the Apple (AAPL) iPhone, viewing it as an opportunity.

Twitter: A Sustainable Company

Twitter is a free social networking and microblogging site, people use to stay connected and updated in real-time. The site allows 140-character microblogs, and has about 32.1 million unique visitors per month.

With users like the CDC, the White House and the Deputy Prime Minister of Iraq, Twitter is feeling pressure to monetize its services.

"Everything on Twitter, like the ‘at replies’ came for the users themselves, came from the usage,” Co-founder Jack Dorsey said. “We recognize what the users are doing, listen to it and monetize from that. We have some new ideas, but we are waiting for the right time.”

Dorsey wants a sustainable company that emerges from the network and speaks to how the people are using the system everyday.

Jay Adelson’s Fifth Start-Up Company, Digg

Digg CEO Jay Adelson is back to Silicon Valley with his fifth start-up company, and this Web site is already getting more than 36 million users per month.

It allows it users to rate and share Internet content, and Adelson said to think of the site’s front page as a newspaper with 36 million editors. Digg works with other newspapers and editorial content to drive traffic to those Web sites.

The site is making profit from ad space, and the Digg data is expected to be valuable to advertisers.

“Imagine you are a user of Digg, telling us what you like or dislike -- we now know what you like,” explained Adelson. “The demographic is great. Right now, media buyers really like our space.  So we are getting 10 to 20 times the price per ad that a social network site will get."

The Future For Vantage Point Venture Partners

One of the most well-known venture capital firms, Vantage Point Venture Partners, has had a hand in a lot of big names over the years. The Vantage Point CEO Alan Salzman says their mission is to assist companies and enable them to become better and more competitive.

“We think they can, but only if they evolve,” said Salzman on Chrysler moving forward.  “We can’t continue to do business the way we did last century.  We’ve got to move forward to the 21^st century, and that involves different business models. In the case of automobiles it means a transition to 21^st century technology, which is an electric drive train.”

Salzman thinks Brightsource, one of Vantage Points investments, is at the dawn of an entire new industry and will be a brilliant solution to the fundamental need for the next century.

The New Light

Bridgelux is the first U.S.-based light-emitting diode, or LED, chip company in the past 20 years. The company’s focus is bringing innovation to light by providing high power, energy-efficient and cost-effective LED solutions.

“We look to develop a product that is not a LED component, but actually a light source,” said Bridgelux CEO Mark Swoboda.

Bridgelux plans to get into the average home with its competitive team.

“We have developed the technology that is able to go into large-scale manufacturing here in Sunnyville,” he said. “We are focused on lights, so the product we develop will solve three problems - quality, efficiency and cost.” 

NetApp Named Best Place to Work

NetApp is partnered with global industry leaders to accelerate and maximize the return on IT infrastructure investments. NetApp makes networked storage devices and Fortune named the company this year the best place to work and one of the best corporate cultures.

The company is currently in a bidding war between EMC (EMC) for data domain, but CEO Dan Warmenhoven said NetApp has a superior bid.

“I think we are both waiting to see what happens with regulators and major constituents,” he said. “I personally think EMC will face some challenges.”